On May 31, 10:12*am, "Andrew Heenan" wrote:

"D DB 90001" wrote:

Southern seem to be gaining oyster readers at many of the
stations I have visited recently, so they are going to be
accepting oyster PAYG soon presumably, the main barrier
to implementation being revenue allocation, and not lack of
Oyster readers.

Revenue allocation is not the issue now - the agreements have been made
operator by operator, not line by line; so Southerns deal was made before
they started installing readers on non-shared stations.

Bzzt... that's basically all wrong Andrew! With regards to the limited
number of existing National Rail (NR) routes that accept Oyster PAYG -
e.g. FGW, c2c - then agreement has indeed been reached individually
between the TOC and TfL. However with regards to the rest of the
network, all the London TOCs are negotiating through ATOC with TfL to
reach an agreement - this appears to have been tortuous, and as yet no
word has come out that the final agreement has actually been signed.


Much more likely that installation is being phased to spread the financial
pain, and where possible to tie in with other work. It's not the readers
that are expensive, but installing them and making them part of the system.
There's even planning issues; though they may appear random, someone has
decided where they should go. The apparent randomness may indicate shortcuts
to share cable runs with other items, etc., etc.

See my comments above. Installation of Oyster readers at NR stations
does at least show that the TOCs ha eventually agreed in principle to
the inevitable, i.e. accepting Oyster PAYG. But the nitty gritty dirty
detail of revenue allocation is almost certainly what's holding
everything up.